Nontraditional Public Enterprise as Local Economic Development Policy

Recently, many local governments have explored or implemented economic development policies involving “local public enterprise,” i.e., local-level public ownership of economic enterprises and other profitmaking productive assets. This policy activity tends to involve enterprises and productive assets not traditionally owned by the local public sector, such as hotels, retail establishments, manufacturing facilities, and sports teams. This emerging but still experimental policy phenomenon is explored systematically below.     

巴黎大众运输公司公交中心 建筑就像坐巴士

位于巴黎南部郊区的林荫大道和巷道交汇处的巴黎大众运输公司公交中心是座很特别的建筑。它由设计大师埃曼纽尔.康巴雷和多米尼克.马雷克设计,建筑功能是控制着巴黎的南部和东部的所有公交线路,满足昼夜不停地接送乘客和管理200辆公交车的交通需求。     

Public Spending on the Arts as Morality Policy: The Structure of Public Attitudes

Successfully reframing a political issue as morality policy should strengthen the hand of those charging immorality. However, reframers face a daunting task in shifting public opinion. In 1989, Christian conservatives attempted to reframe the debate over federal funding for the arts from waste to immorality, by attacking grants for "anti-Christian" and "homoerotic" art. Using General Social Survey data from before, during, and after the attempted reframing, this article assesses the reframers' success in heightening the salience of religion, commitment to civil liberties, and attitudes toward sexuality in public thinking about government spending on the arts.     

Introduction: Disability Policy as an Emerging Field of Mainstream Public Policy Research and Pedagogy

The purpose of this two-part symposium of the Policy Studies Journal is to broaden theconcept of disability policy from one that has relevance onlyforpeople interested in that substantive area to that of a major field of social policy having ramifications for the study and teaching of public policy broadly construed. The goal is for experiences in disability policy to be regarded in the same way that experiences in Other substantive areas, such as environmental policy, other social services, and civil rights, illustrate broader themes in areas such as public management, policy analysis, or ethics.     

Spillovers and the Locational Effects of Public Infrastructure

This paper examines the possibility of negative output spillovers frompublic infrastructure. A model of productive public capital shows that when input factors aremobile, public infrastructure investments in one location can draw production away from otherlocations. In a linear production-function framework, this effect would be manifested as anegative output spillover from public capital. Using data for California counties from 1969through 1988, such negative spillover effects are shown to exist in the case ofstreet-and-highway capital. The data show that changes in county output are positivelyassociated with changes in street-and-highway capital within the same county, but outputchanges are negatively associated with changes in street-and-highway capital in other counties.     

Public Problem Characterization,Policy Solution Generation,and Intra‐Agenda Connectivity

While policy agenda studies have extensively examined the interplays of various venues, one under‐explored area is the internal dynamics within an agenda venue. In this study, we focus on one of the important venues—news media—and investigate the inherent connections between how a public problem is characterized and how problem solutions are generated in media agenda setting. Drawing on agenda‐setting theories, we develop a typology to theorize the relationships between problem characterization and solution advocacy, and use a news dataset on climate change to empirically assess how issue characterization affects issue solution generation. Our logistic regressions demonstrate that the likelihoods of climate change policy solutions being proposed in the news are significantly influenced by how the media stories characterize the issue along four key attribute dimensions: issue image, scope, linkage, and narrative style. Key implications are discussed in the conclusion.     

Politics and Public Policy

Abstract

Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others has been widely praised as the first German film to confront the horrors of the East German communist regime. But the film's politics may be ambiguous. As critical as it is of East Germany, it does not offer a ringing endorsement of West Germany. For example, the film's playwright-hero seems to have artistic problems in the West, just as he did in the East. The film's equivocal attitude toward communism is epitomized by its apparently positive view of the Marxist author Bertolt Brecht. This essay compares The Lives of Others with Brecht's play The Good Person of Szechwan in an effort to understand Donnersmarck's attitude toward his East German predecessor and what it means for his larger view of communism and its relation to art.     

Politics and Public Policy

Abstract

In the figure of Judge Holden, Cormac McCarthy has crafted perhaps the most haunting character in all of American literature. The antagonist of McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Holden is a richly composed portrait of human evil responsible for a litany of wicked deeds. This essay attempts to expound the character of judge Holden, to the end of clarifying McCarthy's definition of evil. It argues that McCarthy, with the judge, lays bare the contours of soul of the evil man, focusing especially on the tension between his ambitious repudiation of justice, on the one hand, and his steadfast, if unwitting, adherence to it, on the other. It is the evil man's conception of the purpose of knowledge, together with his desire to acquire boundless knowledge, that is the key to this tension in his soul.